Original Release: CDV, 2005, PC
The Lula series always sought to be the Penthouse to Leisure Suit Larry’s Playboy, and this 3D adventure took square aim at Magna Cum Laude with tons of nudity and hardcore
Lula 3D (PC, CDV, 2005)
Where to Buy: eBay
Review by: Master-B
CDV’s big-in-Europe porn series took its time making the jump to 3D, seemingly triggered by contemporary Leisure Suit Larry’s “Magna Cum Laude.” Give it this much, though, they clearly put some money and effort into it. For 2005 it’s a pretty good-looking game, it’s just a shame that key pieces of the staff and creative process were clearly inept and the end product is kinda a shambolic mess.
The overall genre is an adventure game that calls to mind Sam & Max Hit the Road, as CDV’s lead character/mascot Lula ends up on a road trip across the US (looking for missing triplet porn stars rather than a Bigfoot and giraffe girl … you even wind up at Mount Rushmore at one point). The engine is in that late 90s/early 00s 3D style of such as Grim Fandango, Gabriel Knight 3 and etc. … just not nearly as good as any of those. It actually hearkens back to older Sierra titles as it’s periodically interrupted by really annoying action sequences.
But before all that, we have to get through the install procedure. Which is an adventure in itself as the developers seemingly had not heard of archive files at this point, instead installing each of the tens of thousands of individual game assets to your hard drive individually. Takes forever even on a modern system (and then again in reverse when you inevitably uninstall). I’ll give it this much though, the original CD version at least installs and runs on Windows 10 almost two decades after its release without a hitch.
Lula in the 2D games always had a bit of a hybrid of Heavy Metal and Jessica Rabbit going on, but in the 3D outing she’s pretty much become Pamela Anderson. Particularly calls to mind Barb Wire, but that actually came out a year after this game! Anyway, Lula is just enjoying her plush life as a stripper and porn actor, but her world is turned upside down when the triplet porn stars from her production company go missing after signs of a struggle. Lula quickly becomes Freelance Police as she investigates the disappearance and soon finds they were kidnapped, following their trail first to San Francisco and then eventually to Vegas and New Orleans (with some stops in the midst).
So this conceit basically shuttles you through a series of self-contained environs, a la Grim Fandango. I don’t think you can “dead man walking” yourself by missing optional items in a scenario, but some stuff opens up little bonuses (mostly videos of Lula either getting nekkid or using her trusty dildo, which she amusingly pulls out slowly like a Sith drawing the lightsaber, on either herself or others). The environments are actually the high point, they’re really pretty visually appealing and detailed. The only complaint is that they’re sometimes pointlessly huge and Lula’s movement speed is too slow. She has a “run” button that makes her trot along, I guess realistic for wearing heels but not the best from a gameplay perspective, but it’s still on the slow side.
If Lula 3D has any appeal it’s in a weird Shenmue sort of way, as you slowly explore these detailed and nice-looking environs just for their own sake and soak up the tons of weird dialogue from the NPCs. The whole game is voice-acted and it really does sound like Shenmue English as the script started out in German and did not exactly get an expert translation to English, seemingly compounded by the voice actors not being given any direction with their lines (thus their inflection and emphasis is sometimes way off).
Unfortunately, nothing else works very well. It’s a very simplistic adventure and you can play huge hunks without a walkthrough, but at some point you’ll need a FAQ as you’ll run into a completely bizarre or nonsensical puzzle. For one example, at one point you need to talk to a hobo about some completely unrelated nonsense, which (without any notice) opens a previously locked door somewhere else just totally at random. It kinda resembles a Japanese visual novel at times as you’ll need to pointlessly talk to the same character about the same thing two or three times, or simply exhaust every dialogue option to flip some random flag.
The game is also quite explicit with its sex content, starting with Lula’s full-frontal during the installation process, but it doesn’t make much of an impression given the Half-Life tier character models. You’ll find NPCs randomly rutting all over the place, to include the promised “Bouncin’ Boobs Technology” at times, but nothing in the game is ever erotic with these low-caliber early 3D models.
The game is at least proper adventure game length, clocking in at at least 10 hours (though there’s quite a bit of padding from slow movement, unnecessary animations, and pointlessly drawn-out dialogue). What drove me off eventually was freezing, which seemed to get progressively more frequent as the game went on (none in the first chapter, once in the second chapter, multiple times beyond that). Lula 3D does offer some entertainment if you like exploring weird, neat-looking game worlds for their own sake, and I think calling it one of the “worst games ever” is a real stretch (I think people reacting more to the porn content than actual quality), but I definitely don’t recommend it.
Links
Getting it running in a window + Windows 11 issues
Videos